Mad, Bad & Sad: James Bartlett Hammond's Last Six Years of Hell (Part IV and Last)

10. BURNING EFFIGIES

OF HIS ENEMIES

1907 and all that 

Interestingly, this headline appeared in a Georgia, Atlanta, newspaper in 1907. Perhaps Thomas Francis Hammond took note and thought people down that way would agree with him about his older brother, the typewriter genius. In New York City, however, only a few did. And they were mostly "alienists" who were paid to think that way.

There were still an awful lot of terrible things ahead for James Bartlett Hammond in the five years before he died in early 1913. But surely Hammond's "annus horribilis" was 1907. That year, ridiculed as a crazed, drunken junkie, Hammond spent almost eight months locked away because of a younger brother's determined but ultimately vain attempt to control the Hammond Type Writer Company's fortune. 

This is the Hammond typewriter, first produced in the winter of 1884-85, which over the following 29 years was significantly developed and spawned a fortune estimated to be worth up to $3 million at the time of James Bartlett Hammond's death ($75 million in today's money).

In September 1910, at the height of Hammond's troubles, Typewriter Topics lauded Hammond as being the only typewriter inventor to maintain control of his own machine through his own company. Interestingly, however, at the beginning, in 1876, Hammond had been invited by Remington to have his typewriter made at its Ilion factory. For a year Hammond worked at Ilion, but when the Remington company got into financial difficulties in 1877, it agreed to renege on its contract with the inventor and to give Hammond back his typewriter. Hammond then continued his experiments at  the Colt Armory in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1878-79. Finally, in 1880-81, Hammond returned to his native Massachusetts and completed his work at the Florence Sewing Machine Works in a village outside Northampton. He boarded with Mrs Mary Smith Mann and befriended another boarder, Canadian-born Charles Eaton Childs (1856-1932), to whom he gave his first successfully completed typewriter.
For the next 26 years, all seemed rosy for Hammond. Then, in 1907, his life began to unravel and descend into hell.

On Thursday, December 5, 1907, a "genial and rational" James Bartlett Hammond was declared sane by a New York Sheriff's Jury and released from the private hospital and sanitarium of Walker Gill Wylie (1848-1923) on West 74th Street.

Walker Gill Wylie

He immediately moved into the Plaza Hotel, opened two months earlier at 768 Fifth Avenue, 11 blocks from his typewriter factory. The next morning, when Hammond returned to the company headquarters and factory, which stretched from 69th to 70th Street, East River, his employees "threw discipline to the winds". According to The New York Times' extensive front page coverage of the rowdy celebrations which ensued, a "prominent part" came when a smiling Hammond watched as his employees "burned effigies of his enemies" from a derrick on a vacant lot opposite the factory.

The Times reported that the first effigy set alight had a "grinning fool's face" and was labelled with the name of a "discharged bookkeeper". Although not identified by the Times, we know that "bookkeeper" to have been James Hammond's Enemy No 1, his company's general manager Albert Bryce, who, along with Hammond's own younger brother, Thomas Francis Hammond, had on James B. Hammond's 68th birthday, on April 23 that year, succeeded in getting the typewriter inventor incarcerated.

The Times described James Bartlett Hammond as being, to his employees, "a combination of Santa Claus and omnipotent Zeus". Shops on Avenue A and First Avenue were "denuded" of flowers to fill Hammond's office, and of American flags. Shrill horns and drums were bought. Other factory workers in the area joined in the festivities marking Hammond's triumphant return, including those from the Central Brewing Company, who supplied beer. This refreshment was a far cry from the "highball" of Kentucky bluegrass whiskey and the painkiller drug antipyrine (Phenazione) which, only a day earlier, Hammond had admitted to the Sheriff's Jury that he had been consuming eight times a day before being locked away. He had told an earlier jury, in late September:

"Those after me", it would sadly emerge in 1908, were no more interested in completing Hammond's work on perfecting his typewriter than Bryce or Thomas F. Hammond had been. Hammond's remaining five board members were, like Bryce, far more concerned with the money it earned them than the typewriter itself. They were just waiting until Hammond was out of the way, recuperating in Europe in the summer of 1908, before they too pounced on this feeble old man.
But back to 1907 ... and a chain of events which was sparked by James Bartlett Hammond startling fellow guests in the foyer of the Hotel Cumberland by "talking incoherently", "wildly singing and shouting" while celebrating "giving all his money away to British [sic] employe[e]s" (according to the Pittsburgh Daily Post on April 24). Thomas F. Hammond testified that his brother had only imaged this generosity to be the case, when in fact it was in large part true (apart from the British bit). Thomas Hammond also thought James Hammond quoted too much Shakespeare (maybe that's where the idea of "British" employees came into it?) and talked about drama but not enough about business. But, then, what would Thomas F. Hammond have known? He wasn't involved with the Hammond Type Writer Company in 1907, and hadn't been since he moved to New York in 1900 from Philadelphia, where he'd been no more than a Hammond typewriter agent.
Putting the claim of James B. Hammond being "daft" from drugs and liquors into context, here is the response from neurologist Graeme Monroe Hammond, no relation but a former pupil of James Hammond, to a question put to him by a juror in the New York Supreme Court on September 24, 1907:

Or had he, in fact, been poisoned by someone else, against his will? James B. Hammond later testified that:

The catalyst for Thomas Francis Hammond's actions in paying detectives and "alienists" to have James Hammond locked away was a decision made by the directors of the Hammond Type Writer Company, on February 8, 1907, to increase the pay of workers by a substantial 10 per cent, effective as of the start of that year. James Hammond was already an extremely generous employer, giving his staff an interest in the business, quarterly dividends of consistently more than a week's pay, a bonus of a week's wage at Christmas, and turkeys to married workers and gold coins to unmarried staff at Thanksgiving, as well as regular jaunts in the countryside in one of his five limousines. As the Times reported after Hammond's release, "His kindness to his employe[e]s was interpreted [by Thomas F. Hammond] as throwing away his fortune." At the Sheriff's Jury hearing in September 1907 - after which a hung jury was discharged, having deliberated for more than five hours - jurors were told Hammond had "made over all his stock [in the company] to his chief employe[e]s in trust with the intention of founding a typewriter institution to bear his name".

11. RECLUSIVE BROTHER

Californian shipworker shuns family wealth

Thomas Francis Hammond contended this move was the result of ill-will James Bartlett Hammond bore toward his siblings "through delusions on his part". What the courts were NOT told about was the extreme goodwill James Hammond had shown toward another brother, one not involved in any action against him - and in particular, one who did not have his dirt-stained hand out for a slice of the typewriter money.
It has not previously been recorded in typewriter histories, but on July 6, 1907, another of James B. Hammond's younger brothers, an "independently wealthy" John Tow Hammond, died, aged 62, while working for a meagre salary at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, 25 miles north-east of San Francisco in Vallejo, California. John T. Hammond had given his Vallejo friends the impression he was a virtual pauper, not divulging to them that two of his brothers, James B. Hammond and Broadway furrier and taxidermist Charles Nash Hammond, (1859-; not to be confused with wealthy Chicago fur dealer Charles Norton Hammond, 1820-98, who was no relation) were both millionaires in New York. But, according to the San Francisco Call, John T. Hammond was more than happy for that situation to exist. In April 1907, the very month in which Thomas had had James locked up, James and Charles had both written to John appealing to him to join them in New York and to "live in affluence". He had declined their requests. It is conceivable that, knowing of James' and Charles' offers to John, Thomas had become envious of their wealth, and wanted some of it for himself.
But after James B. Hammond's own death, in January 1913, it was Charles Nash Hammond in New York, not Thomas Francis Hammond, by then in Augusta, Georgia, who led the family battle to break James' will, in which James had left his estate worth $3 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Within two days of James Hammond's incarceration in late April 1907, one of his co-directors of the Hammond Type Writer Company, banker James Wilson Davis (1838-1908), was declaring a "plot" and protesting "conspiracy" to the national press, saying James Hammond was not only "perfectly sane, but was the victim of certain persons who desired to see him sent away". According to The New York Times, Davis "named names". Davis himself was denied permission to visit James Hammond at the Bellevue Hospital, where Hammond was sent the evening of his kerbside arrest.

Hammond's personal physician, Franklin Burke, had also been denied access to his client, but the nationwide publicity of Hammond's arrest at least meant he soon had attorneys beating a path to his bedside at the Bellevue, and later to Wylie's sanitarium. The first lawyer to turn up to defend Hammond was the Hammond company's counsel, Alexander Brough (1863-1940), a Scottish-born attorney and politician - though newspapers at first thought he was representing Thomas F. Hammond. In late June, however, Brough became a member of the New York State Assembly, which curtailed his work for the typewriter inventor (though he remained the company counsel until sacked as a share usurper in July 1909). He was also a member of the New York State Senate in 1909-10. In 1916, he was appointed by Mayor John Purroy Mitchel as a City Magistrate.

June 25, 1907

Brough's successor as Hammond's counsel was James Walker Osborne (1859-1919), a fearless lawyer known to come out swinging in court. Osborne succeeded in having the insanity verdict against Hammond re-examined on June 24, 1907. He was a partner in the Broadway law firm Osborne, Lamb & Wilcox and a former Assistant District Attorney of New York. For 25 years Osborne was one of the city's most prominent criminal lawyers, after a career as an able prosecutor. His son was a New York Times reporter.

12. ATTACK OF THE ALIENISTS

Thomas Hammond's paid 'spies'

Dr Graeme Hammond

In July and August 1907, attorney James W. Osborne had psychiatrists Henry Valentine Wildman Jr (1889-1968) and William Elliott Dold (1856-1942), and neurologist Graeme Monroe Hammond (1858-1944, no relation), visit James B. Hammond in Wylie's sanitarium. On September 20 they each testified to a Sheriff's Jury and a commission that James Hammond was "entirely competent", though Dr Wildman said Hammond's memory and temper had been effected by his "highballs". However, he added that Hammond was not deluded. 
Graeme Hammond said his interest in the case was aroused because James B. Hammond had been his first teacher and had prepared him for college at the Columbia School of Mines in 1877.

April 27, 1907

In the other corner, paid to back Thomas F. Hammond in his claims that his genius older brother was mad, was a group of "alienists" (psychiatrists) that James B. Hammond would describe as "spies".

=

The "alienists" initially contended that James Hammond was suffering from Bright's disease and Locomotor ataxia. Bright's disease is a classification of kidney diseases that would be described in modern medicine as acute or chronic nephritis, frequently accompanied by hypertension. Locomotor ataxia is the inability to precisely control bodily movements. Persons afflicted may walk in a jerky, non-fluid manner.
The Thomas F. Hammond 'team of spies' and the alleged "neutrals" included: 

Austin Flint (1836-1915), appointed by James W. Osborne to defend Hammond, but of whom Hammond was particularly contemptuous, claiming he "was trying to ride two horses at the same time". Flint was professor of physiology and microscopic anatomy at Bellevue from 1861 until Bellevue was consolidated with the medical department of New York University in 1898, when he was appointed professor of physiology in Cornell University Medical College. He was Surgeon-General of New York in 1874. He carried out extensive experimental investigations in human physiology. 

Preston Pope Satterwhite (1867-1948), a wealthy surgeon against whom Hammond had a partial 1911 court win over medical expenses. Hammond said he had no faith in Satterwhite's honesty.

Carlos Frederick MacDonald (1845-1926), a professor of mental diseases at the Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City from 1888-96 and chairman of the New York State Commission in Lunacy from 1880-96.

William Bradley Coley (1862-1936). 

Pearce Bailey (1865-1922), who was employed by Thomas F. Hammond specifically to "secure evidence of [the] alleged insanity" of James B. Hammond (see here). Bailey in turn asked an "alienist" called David Orr Edson to attend to James Hammond. Edson later tried to charge James Hammond, and then Thomas Hammond, a total of $1430 for his services. This also led to court action, in 1911, when Neal Dow Becker represented James Hammond. Bailey perfected a system for weeding out "mental defectives" which is said to have been used as a model by the Allies in World War I.

May 1907

Gustav Scholer (1851-1928) was a German-American physician who served as coroner of New York City. He worked for various hospitals and was examining surgeon for the US Bureau of Pensions. He was manager of the Manhattan Psychiatric Centre on Ward's Island and director of the Washington Heights Hospital. He also served as an ambulance surgeon for that institution as well as for Bellevue Hospital. He specialised in the treatment of nervous diseases and insanity.

April 26, 1907

Smith Ely Jelliffe (1866-1945) was a New York City neurologist, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. 

Allan McLane Hamilton (1848-1919) was a "famous insanity expert" who developed insights into loss of memory and figured in the Guiteau, Thaw and other trials. He was a grandson of founding father Alexander Hamilton. In the years following James B. Hammond's release from Wylie's sanitarium, it was generally Hamilton who was blamed for having Hammond legally, albeit temporarily, declared insane.

Menas Sarkas Boulgourjian Gregory (1872-1941).

September 28, 1907

13. SEA OF DARKNESS

The Curse of the Lounger II

"The Ideal Life" was what a boating publication predicted for John Bartlett Hammond in 1911. Ha! This sequence of unfortunate events outlines just how rocky the years from 1908 to 1912 were for Hammond:

After having had his name - more often than not ingloriously - splashed across newspapers right throughout 1907, in 1908 Hammond managed to stay out of the headlines - until the very end of the year. Following his return from a recuperative trip to Europe in October 1908, he embarked on a two-year legal battle to regain the shares in his own company, and had his celebrated stoush with Horace Greeley Allen in New York City in December 1908 (see previous post in this series). Hammond then spent (for him) a fairly quiet winter in 1908-09 in Washington DC. Though he claimed in court in April 1911 that he wasn't physically able to hit Allen twice on the head with his cane, Hammond was fit enough to run a foot race on the banks of the Potomac. He later boarded his first yacht, a refitted Lounger, to enjoy the warmer months of 1909 cruising the Atlantic Coast. But, if he thought he was in for a lazy, hazy time of it that spring and summer, he was very sadly mistaken.

. Confident of success in his efforts to reclaim his own company, in late February 1909 Hammond spent $28,300 to buy two more blocks of land on 69th Street east of Avenue A.

. Consequently thought to be flush with funds, in May 1909 Hammond was the victim in a blackmail attempt by his French chauffeur Antoine Castello (1887-), freshly arrived in New York from Le Havre on La Lorraine in January of that year. Castello stole Hammond's Panhard limousine and demanded cash for its safe return.

. Hammond then unwittingly convicted his next chauffeur (Castello's successor), Patrick Keogh, by telling a city magistrate that Keogh was definitely not driving faster than 12mph. The speed limit was 10mph.

. In mid-May 1909, Hammond's first yacht, the Lounger, built by Hammond at Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1884, went temporarily missing. Hammond had appointed Finn Erick Erickson (1863-) as captain and Erickson was to sail the yacht from New York Harbour for Washington DC on May 13, after a motor had been fitted in South Brooklyn.

. The court battle over Hammond's company shares opened on August 23, 1909. Hammond spent some of the winter, to February 1910, socialising in Palm Beach, Florida.

. To celebrate the win in his fight for his shares (on June 22, 1910), on August 14, 1910, James B. Hammond and Hammond company cashier Herman A. Peterson withdrew 10,000 sparkling new Lincoln pennies from a bank and then with Keogh at the wheel drove from New York to Oyster Bay as Hammond handed out the pennies to children along the way.

. On February 4, 1911, Hammond won a reversal of a $535 verdict against him and in favour of "alienist" David Orr Edson for unsought services allegedly provided while Hammond was confined in Wylie's sanitarium in 1907.

. On March 5, 1911, Hammond was forced by a New York Supreme Court jury to pay Preston Pope Satterwhite (1867-1948) $215 of the $715 Satterwhite had claimed for medical expenses. Again, these were incurred while Hammond was confined against his will in Wylie's sanitarium.

. On April 2, 1911,  Hammond was once more before the Supreme Court, this time charged with assault in the matter of Horace Greeley Allen. Allen sued Hammond for $10,000 for injury and humiliation. Hammond was alleged to have hit Allen twice on the head with his cane, while relieving Allen of his five shares in the Hammond company. Hammond responded by saying that far from being able to hit another man with his cane, he had been unable to lift his arms above his head from more than 25 years, since 1886. On April 3, the jury awarded Allen $100 in damages. Everyone, it seemed, was out for their pound of flesh.

 The Lounger II

. From 1910, Hammond had repeatedly stated that once he had set off cruising around the world on his second yacht, Lounger II, he would remain at sea until he died. He said he planned to live until the age of 100, meaning that from the yacht's launch in 1911 he would be on Lounger II for 27 years. In that time, he wanted to "touch every port of the world", then donate his yacht to the Smithsonian Institute as a model of "maritime architecture" of the period.

If Hammond thought he was going to be able to put his feet up, sail the Seven Seas and thoroughly enjoy the rest of his days, he was very, very sadly mistaken. The story of the Lounger II would be one fraught with mishaps and misfortune, none of which have previously been chronicled in typewriter histories. These have consistently suggested there was one uneventful (that is, of course, until Hammond's death) voyage starting in July 1911. In fact there were three voyages, all of them extremely eventful.

There were two false starts before his final voyage. Hammond first set off, three weeks behind schedule, from the New York Yacht, Launch & Engine Company at Morris Heights on the Harlem River on July 23, 1911, headed for New Haven, Connecticut, to visit his friend, Yale Professor Eugene Lamb Richards (1838-1912) while the Lounger II had gasoline tanks fitted and took on provisions. After that Hammond reached Newport, Rhode Island. He was headed for the Atlantic and Bermuda, Panama and Gibraltar.

Johan Mikael Into and Pinkie

For this voyage, Erick Erickson was relegated to waiter and wireless operator, while Erickson's cousin, Finnish-born Johan Mikael Into (1865-1958) was made skipper and navigator, Into's wife Anna Wilmena Holmberg Into (1872-1951) the cook and their son Edwin Grover Into (1893-1986) a crewman. As well, Hammond set off with his nurse Mary Ellison, a masseur, his chauffeur Patrick Keogh, his then private secretary, the very newly-wedded Ulysses Mercur Holmes (1890-1985), a laundress, Hammond's Boston bulldog Pinkie (aka Pinkey), a mother dog with her six puppies, a canary and a large phonograph.

Into told the New-York Daily Tribune that the Lounger, after sailing to various European ports, would be overhauled and would give the famous Australian yawl Pandora "a run for her money". The Pandora had left Bunbury in Western Australia on May 3, 1910, and was the first small boat to round Cape Horn. It reached New York on June 23, 1911, exactly one month before Hammond departed.

As he sat under his yachting's awning, basking in the sun and the prestige attached to owning such a huge and unusually fitted craft, Hammond predicted "harmony on board". Again, how wrong he was! For whatever reason, he was only at sea a matter of weeks. He set off again, in October 14, 1911, and this second voyage only lasted until May 10, 1912, during which time Hammond had only reached as far afield as Nassau in the Bahamas. But what a tumultuous time!

Within 10 days of departure, on October 24, 1911, the Lounger II was seized at Norfolk, Virginia, because of unpaid bills totalling $2192.57 from the New York Yacht, Launch & Engine Company for the heating and refrigeration units. Hammond maintained the heating system didn't work. Fearing death from the cold if held up in Norfolk until December, on October 27 Hammond forked out $4500 in order to continue his voyage. At this point Holmes left as Hammond's private secretary and Hammond recruited a local young bookkeeper and clerk, Harry Stewart Mackan (1885-1971), to take on the task. Mackan remained with Hammond until Hammond's death. As Hammond and Mackan headed out of Norfolk, Hammond said:

Nothing would stop him? How wrong he was! Two weeks later there was more major trouble on board, this time with the crew. On November 11, 1911, Hammond sacked Into for disobeying an order from Hammond to hurriedly sail south (Into wanted to stay safely in port in Jacksonville). Along with Into, the rest of Into's family and Erickson walked off the yacht. Hammond and Mackan did somehow manage to head off south to St Augustine, but had to return under US Navy guard to Jacksonville when, on November 14, 1911, Erickson and the Into family started legal action, demanding unpaid wages. The case was heard on board the yet-again-seized Lounger II while it was moored in Jacksonville. Hammond paid $319.14 and signed a bond for $2000.

 

A week later, on November 22, 1911, Hammond, with the help of Mackan, narrowly escaped serious injury when the Lounger II caught fire as she lay tied up at the foot of Main Street in Jacksonville. Hammond suspected an incendiary device had been used, and $2000 worth of damage was caused to the $35,000 yacht. Yet amid all this excitement, Hammond didn't forget to arrange for his loyal workers in New York to receive their traditional Thanksgiving turkeys on November 26.

. By early February 1912 Hammond and Mackan had reached Miami in a hastily repaired Lounger II with a stand-in crew and they socialised there until the end of winter. Hammond had planned to sail on to Key West and Havana.

. Meanwhile, Into and his family had remained in Jacksonville and on March 27, 1912, Into filed a $25,000 slander suit against Hammond, claiming Hammond had alleged it was a disgruntled Into who had set the Lounger II on fire.

. This matter was soon settled when Hammond, amazingly, decided to reappoint Into as commander of the Lounger II. By early May 1912, Hammond, Mackan and Into were back in Mackan's hometown of Norfolk, Virginia. But in mid-May, Into went down with appendicitis and Hammond took him from Norfolk to St Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan for an operation and recovery. Without a skipper, Hammond was stuck on dry land in New York City for the time being and took this opportunity to sign his last will and testament on August 30, 1912, while the Lounger II had to remain moored at Nyack.

. On October 23, 1912, a gang of "pirates" led by a criminal engineer called "Doc" Lehman tried to steal the Lounger II from its mooring at Nyack and sail it to the Canary Islands. They were foiled when the Lounger II hit a cable from a heavy schooner moored alongside it. Among those arrested were Texan Edward Kimberlain, and teenagers Joseph Romano, Domino Cuzio and Raymond Donadi. 

. At the end of 1912, Hammond, Mackan and Into once more set off for warmer climes in the south. They got as far as St Augustine. On January 26, 1913, Hammond took ill on board his yacht off the Florida coast. He was taken ashore to the Hotel Alcasar in St Augustine. There he died the next day - not on board Lounger II, as has been commonly claimed. In a pithy one-line headline to a three-line report of his passing, the Daily Capital Journal of Salem, Oregon said, "IS POOR NOW". It was probably more accurate than the Capital Journal realised at the time.

Much later in the year, the Dixon Evening Telegraph in Illinois took a much more conciliatory tone:

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle ended its obituary: "He had expected to live to be 100, and had so stated. If this was a delusion, it was general enough among elderly men of scientific tendencies to involve no further risk of restrain as a lunatic. On the whole, his life was both useful and honourable."

Hammond's "heirs-at-law" and his widow Jennette Maxwell Hammond reached an agreement not to contest his will in May 1913. The "heirs-at-law" received $135,000 all up and Jennette $40,000 of the $3 million Hammond typewriter fortune. Soon after Hammond's death, the Intos settled in Miami and lived there until they died in the 1950s. Mackan joined the US Navy as a pay clerk and married Anna Houston in the Bronx in 1923. The couple moved to Charlestown, South Carolina, then San Diego and Honolulu. Mackan died in Silverdale, Washington, in 1971. His predecessor as Hammond's secretary, Ulysses Mercur Holmes, died in Zephyrhills, Florida, on May 15, 1985, aged 95. The last survivor of the "Hammond saga" of 1911-13 was Edwin Grover Into, who died just 29 years ago, in Essex, Connecticut, on November 6, 1986, aged 93. His death certificate listed him as a self-employed model maker. What a story he could have told! 

Inglis M.Upperrcu, last man to inherit the curse of the Lounger II

The Lounger II was in August 1913 sold to yacht and automobile broker Harvey Wilson Dobbins Jr (1875-), president of the Dobbins Automobile Exchange of Newark, New Jersey. Dobbins sold it on to car sales pioneer Inglis Moore Uppercu (1877-1944). The "Curse of the Lounger II" struck again on May 16, 1914, when, while undergoing repairs at the Staten Island Shipbuilding Company's yards at Port Richmond, the gasoline tank exploded and killed a newly-wed worker, Frank Baum, 26, who was blown 40 feet into the air. A second explosion set the yacht alight. But in 1916 it was back in commission and even had its own tender, a 25-foot mahogany boat. In August 1921 Mrs Uppercu, headed for her summer home at Deal Beach, was on the Lounger II when it rescued passengers from a downed seaplane at Sandy Hook Bay.

This is where James Bartlett Hammond died on January 27, 1913, NOT at sea.

THE END